Factorio

meStevo said:

3 of us playing, but ive played quite a bit

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Those are 2 week / lifetime stats and we're 5 weeks into this playthrough.

There's one more who's time would exceed mine but his stats are private.

Currently making the first tier of astronomic and material sciences. Probably energy 1 and either material 2 or astro 2 next, which would put us on a path towards playing with the space elevator I think.

The imersite crystal sink that is the material science research is just, oof. Think 2 complete rockets of imersite yielded something like 300 research.

As raw resource demands increase in orbit I've started making more things on the surface and sending them up. The raw cards that become data cards was the first I did that with because of the volume of stuff like iron plates. Think I'll do the blue engines on the surface too soon.

I'm still learning really basic things with the logistics. For example I realized I could have 2 belts look at each other and have one only go if the other is empty, so that lets me prioritize the core drill-derived coal instead of them trying to merge and the core-drill coal backing up. Much better to let mined stuff sit there and trains take a break than for trickle of resources from the core drill to stop. Remedial things for what you guys are doing, but concepts I'll apply later and on future playthroughs forever.

Heading to a conference tomorrow and new wow classic expansion... so will be easing up a bit on this probably.

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Some 800 hours into Factorio and I'm still learning little tricks to improve my factories. Most of it is UPS related though.

Behold, Arco Balancer Mk. I



It uses a rules based system ( Rule-based system - Wikipedia ). Basically for each of the 10 balancing machines,

1. If output too low, we want to run this machine
2. If input is too high, we want to run this machine
3. If we want to run this machine and have enough of the input, then run this machine by requesting its inputs.

It works well but I haven't really seen what other people have built so I don't know how other people have solved this. It also seems like the balancer has to run a bunch of cycles every time the other factories that Naquium Tesseracts or sciences run and disrupt the natural order. The one thing I wanted to integrate was some logic to defer running a given machine if it has too much of the output.

The other idea I had was to use a score-based system that would score the inputs and outputs and run if it exceeds some threshold. I think I'll let this one run and continue building my factory.

also

Rebuilt my nauvis research base. Don't mind the huge yellow storehouses, they are just holding glut and will be depleted as the factory produces stuff. This uses the "box of chocolates" approach I've been using in addition to the compressed requester train stations. I wish there was a way to have multiple items in a train provider, but I don't know how with LTN. Maybe Cybersyn has that???

Biggest new thing I'm trying out is maximizing usage of underground belts. I heard it improves UPS but after reading about it I'm not so sure. I like the aesthetics of long straight lines of belts over a bunch of undeground belts, so I probably won't use this in the future.



full res:

Here's my scrap processing on Nauvis. When material research is going this place gets buuusy. Looking at it now I'm not sure why I built it on Nauvis instead of Nauvis Orbit, since I believe scrap is less dense than the materials it turns into.

I think this base was my first time creating a "side buffer" with a simple circuit that puts materials into the buffer only if the train stop chest is full, and then extracts from the buffer when the train stop chest is emptyish. This has the benefit of getting full less quickly while not incurring a UPS cost of generally moving materials through a huge buffer.

Before I got a space elevator I remember just storing all the copper/iron etc in a massive number of chests that I did fuck all with, lol. I should have processed it into plates onsite and don't remember why I did it that way.

I'll probably copy-paste this quadrant into orbit.

Tholan said:

Never played krastorio or SE, but is there a reason why your trains are that short ? I usually try to have a t leas 6-8 wagons in the original game, is there some super wagon there or there is so few items built that you can't wait for a full train to load ?

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In my case, almost all my trains are 1-1 (1 engine, 1 cargo). I have some areas where I use 1-4-1 (1 engine, 4 cargo, 1 engine). Initially I had most things at 1-4-1, and it worked fine but for most items the volume being transported is so low that it's not justified. If you have multiple cargo wagons they have to be split from your source factory/mine and then merged into your destination factory. This is usually done using belts or containers which incurs a UPS cost. You additionally need a much larger train and station footprint, which will increase the size of your factory. After unlocking artillery, your factory size isn't a big deal, but I find the closer I am to my mall the more enjoyable it is to build stuff because I don't have to wait as long for logistics bots. Finally, so many resources I don't want to have a bunch of containers full of stuff to transport around. Even to the point where many of my trains transport only 10 stacks at a time. I might relax this later, but all my space sciences only transport 10 stacks, and many of my super expensive resources are at 10 stacks. Embracing 1-1 simplifies factories dramatically, as you can see from my screenshots of factories that occupy a small space and have some ~10 inputs/outputs.

Finally, 1-1 throughput in congested and small networks is suprisingly good compared to 1-4-1. In congested networks the trains spend so little time at top speed that the higher acceleration of the smaller trains wins against the higher volume of the 1-4-1 trains. This could be offset by using 2-4-2 trains, but then you exacerbate the problems with larger stations. Long ass trains excel at long ass distances, which SE doesn't really have.

I'm working on a new naquitite factory that will probably use 2-5-2 trains on a dedicated railway network with a dedicated space elevator and I'm really excited about it.

meStevo said:

So how many surfaces / orbits do you guys have a presence on? As a multiplayer game we're pushing 250mb of maps to download everytime we load the game now. We have 8 bases/outposts currently. Currently need to get a better source of iridite so probably setup a new outpost dedicated for that and we have touched vitamelange yet so that'll require another. So we'll be hitting double digits shortly.

Edit: and yeah.. i take it all back, im drowning in scrap. Need to redo that meager setup, lol. I send up a rocket of material packs and suddenly im at over 20k scrap and counting in all my random boxes and shit as my current setup slowly catches up.

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I'll probably end up with an outpost for every core fragment product except iron, copper, rare earth metals (from Krastorio2) and coal. Then a couple for asteroid belts, 1 for asteroid fields and another for sun orbit for my energy glaive farm.

Tholan Note that my railway network hasn't been truly stressed because my realized SPM production has always been way lower than what my factories can produce. And most factories are only active intermittently as I am moving through the tech tree. I've almost finished the tech tree and when I do I'm going to try to get a consistent SPM which will activate all my factories. At that point I might realize my rail network is grossly underprovisioned and have to rethink a lot. We'll see!